he philosophy of the tidyverse is similar toand inspired by the “unix philosophy” (Raymond 2003), a set of loose principles that ensure most command line tools play well together https://t.co/Et87p0K2cM

Busy researchers,
This paper explains rigorously, eloquently and succinctly how a new set of tools can help base-R users become more productive:
Declutter your R workflow with tidy tools (https://t.co/e5iMSc5p2z, by @zevross, @hadleywickham and @drob)
@ForestGEO #rstats https://t.co/uKYAOrdNVC

"Although base R packages perform well in most settings, workflows can be made more efficient ... with more consistent arguments, inputs and outputs and emphasizing constantly improving code over historical code consistency. "
(@zevross, et. al.; https://t.co/e5iMSc5p2z)

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Abstract

The R language has withstood the test of time. Forty years after it was initially developed (in the form of the S language) R is being used by millions of programmers on workflows the inventors of the language could never have imagined. Although base R packages perform well in most settings, workflows can be made more efficient by developing packages with more consistent arguments, inputs and outputs and emphasizing constantly improving code over historical code consistency. The universe of R packages known as the tidyverse, including dplyr, tidyr and others, aim to improve workflows and make data analysis as smooth as possible by applying a set of core programming principles in package development.

Author Comment

This is part of the 'Practical Data Science for Stats' Collection.

Additional Information

Competing Interests

Zev Ross is CEO at ZevRoss Spatial Analysis, Hadley Wickham is chief scientist at RStudio and David Robinson is Data Scientist at Stack Overflow

Author Contributions

Zev Ross conceived and designed the experiments, performed the experiments, analyzed the data, contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools, wrote the paper, prepared figures and/or tables, performed the computation work, reviewed drafts of the paper.

Hadley Wickham conceived and designed the experiments, performed the experiments, analyzed the data, contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools, wrote the paper, prepared figures and/or tables, performed the computation work, reviewed drafts of the paper.

David Robinson conceived and designed the experiments, performed the experiments, analyzed the data, contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools, wrote the paper, prepared figures and/or tables, performed the computation work, reviewed drafts of the paper.

Data Deposition

The following information was supplied regarding data availability:

The code and a link to the data (a Google source) are in the paper.

Funding

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